While digging around for texture stuff I also came across this thing that sounded pretty cool. And a tool to substitute in other music of course. I'm not too sure if it works and I'm a bit too tired at the moment to sit around to find out, but if it does that is neat.

No idea about substituting the music in, but direct song offers absolutely god awful rips if memory serves. I also usually just have my library playing instead of ingame music since I've heard it all hundreds, if not thousands of times.

Friend of mine snagged some stuff from Direct Song and threw it in a spectral analyzer and said it looked like crap. I haven't listened to the stuff you buy, but the bonus codes sound pretty bad. I'm a bit of an audiophile though, so I'm very picky about some things.

I had to leave to Texas on pretty short notice and didn't have time to let everyone know, and didn't have much access to the internet while I was gone. So, to those who despaired since the FP guild was suffering from the inability to get new members and what not, I'm very sorry.

But I'm back now and I'll be promoting officers and we can get everything else underway pretty quickly now.

I didn't explore all of the VERY beginning area of the Factions campaign. That extremely basic tutorial area ("Click me to get a quest. Move with WASD." etc)
Can I still get the Canthan cartographer title?

You don't need the boardwalk to get cart titles. It just makes it easier. Now that people do FA, and JQ, there isn't any reason you need it though.

On top of that, since you can easily change your secondary profession (I'm assuming you have gotten most of the way through the campaign to even care about cartography titles), you can still explore the boardwalk with the heart of shadow portal trick.

Also, if anybody wants to join the guild, we would be ecstatic to have another dance partner. We're a kurzick alliance, everybody's pretty nice, mostly PVE, but I think some people do PVP too. Also, making a rit is apparently useful, as our guild leader has a good working UW solo farm build for rit

Man, I just got myself involved in the Factions factions. I am so confused, I think I sorta understand how the faction points work out, in very basic terms... does it get easier to figure out at all?

Basically, you do quests for one side, it makes the other hate you. When you get points, you can give them to your alliance, which raises you Kurzick or Luxon title track. There are a few skills based on these titles. Or, you can buy things like amber chunks, scrolls and a couple other items.

But the most important thing is the armor and PVP. You can get Luxon and Kurzick armor based on your factions. Kurzicks wont make you armor if you have a higher Luxon faction.

There are PVP things for each side. You don't really need to worry about the factions unless you do PVP (Jade Quarry, Fort Aspenwood, etc). Those give points as a reward.

Man, I just got myself involved in the Factions factions. I am so confused, I think I sorta understand how the faction points work out, in very basic terms... does it get easier to figure out at all?

Factions is the closest thing Guild Wars has to world pvp. It is therefore complete and utter trash and really really fucking inconvenient.

Keep in mind when you say faction, you may be referring to the factions campaign, balthazzar faction, kurzick/luxon faction, or the kurzick and luxon factions themselves.

Now... grab a bucket because your brain is going to need it. :psyduck:

Essentially if you look at the world map for factions (the campaign), you see a red and blue line going down it. This line indicates where the factions (kurzick and luxon) own territory. This line moves as the war (alliance battles, where members of your faction (kursick/luxon) fight members of the other faction(kurzick/luxon)) between the two factions (kurzick and luxon) goes on.

You can acquire faction (points) by competing in certain factions (campaign) pvp settings, or by vanquishing areas owned by a specific faction (kurzick and luxon), or by buying blessings from the preists of the corresponding faction (kurzick or luxon) at a resurrection shrine and killing things. Some missions in factions (the campaign) also give points to their corresponding faction (kurxick/luxon)

You can spend faction (points) to buy stuff like amber or jade, or the faction's (campaign) factions' (kurzick/luxon) pve skills. You can also purchase allegiance rank for your guild by spending faction (points). Guilds with high enough faction (points) get to own towns and outposts of the same faction (kurzick or luxon) in factions (campaign). Owning a town gives you access to merchants that sell items at a moderate discount.

This is useful if you are buying lockpicks and such in bulk but has minimal gameplay benefit outside of that. 100k of picks at 1.5k vs 1.2k is pretty hefty. People who own towns frequently sell picks at 1.25k or 80 per 100k. When you are pushing 100k around, the modest 1.6k in gold is inconsequential.

:psyboom: Head hurting yet?

Well, here is where it gets really fucking annoying. If you have more faction (points) with a faction (kurzick/luxon), you cannot use the majority of the merchants and traders in towns controlled by the faction (kurzick/luxon) that you have less faction (points) in.

Furthermore, spending faction (points)in either faction (kurzick/luxon) decreases your faction (points) in the other faction (kurzick/luxon) so it is impossible to use faction (points) in both factions (kurzick/luxon) at once. This means that you have to pick one and then drain it to as close to zero as you can, or you are wasting points.

Again.. uhh what? It shifts every couple of hours unless one side is sucking particularly badly. Then again, it does tend to go through swings where one side dominates the other. I remember a few years ago the kurzicks had pushed back the border as far as it can go for a few days.

I also stay out of factions because there really is nothing to do there once you've completed the game outside of farming. Well, I sometimes troll morons in fort aspenwood with a cripshot ranger. 50% snare on 3 and 4 targets is great for pissing people off while still being useful. Having 2 assassins and a warrior chase you doing nothing for an entire match is great, and you can cap shrines while doing this. It's like playing a dead ringer spy. If you have a huge portion of the other team doing nothing trying to kill you, you cripple (HAHA cripshot) their offense.

Now... where was I... oh yeah.. the borders. Generally speaking it doesn't last more than a week or two.

See this is what I hate about factions. Back when I actually played seriously I had quite a few good members for guilds slip through my fingers because they wanted to join one side or another. Gameplay wise, there is no reason for it. It just gets in the way. You should be able to float back and forth with no penalties. Some asshats decided it would be fun to grief during alliance battles and kill themselves using necromancer skills. This is why we can't have nice things.

Competition is fine, but this actively splits the playerbase, and the fastest way to get points has never been, and never will be, playing the pvp. It's stupid. I can farm up to 20,000 points an hour if I 600 smite things. That's easily 30,00 40,000 points on the title per hour I grind.

See this is what I hate about factions. Back when I actually played seriously I had quite a few good members for guilds slip through my fingers because they wanted to join one side or another. Gameplay wise, there is no reason for it. It just gets in the way. You should be able to float back and forth with no penalties. Some asshats decided it would be fun to grief during alliance battles and kill themselves using necromancer skills. This is why we can't have nice things.

Competition is fine, but this actively splits the playerbase, and the fastest way to get points has never been, and never will be, playing the pvp. It's stupid. I can farm up to 20,000 points an hour if I 600 smite things. That's easily 30,00 40,000 points on the title per hour I grind.

um i was joking

My guild back when I started the game had 30-so members. I joined Kurzicks, and 20 of those members left. That's why I always blame Kurzicks

Also, Kurzick side always loses battles for towns. It is the law of nature.

Ye, but thats because the koreans don't play much guild wars anymore, cause the first year when factions came out the kurzicks owned alot of towns (yes, the koreans were kurzicks), but the next year luxons started to take over.

Doesn't really matter if you were joking or not. (In retrospect that line is rather brusque. I did not intend that.) My point stands. It's somewhat annoying to switch, and if you are devoted to working on the allegiance ranks, you loose months of work if you switch. Of course, now the titles actually matter somewhat because of the pve skills. That isn't to say that it wasn't a problem before this.

Sure, getting rank 5 or 6 is all you really need to use all of the skills effectively, which is only around 900,000 points.

As a major player in an alliance of what was around 3-400 people it was frustrating as hell to snag someone, especially someone who was good, polite, useful, etc, and have him leave a week later because he felt like joining the opposite faction. Gameplay wise, there shouldn't be a need for this.

Over the weekend my Prophecies group and I proceeded to the Abaddon's Mouth outpost.

And man, how I wish we could just dedicate a couple of hours to get it done, I really want to see what EotN is like. But, not complaining. ;) Perhaps after we do I'll be available for vanquishing with you guys.

A question about that: Probably seems obvious, but do you unlock Hard Mode for the entire game world, or just the continent you finish the campaign on?

If it's any consolation, the Factions campaign is terribly short so it shouldn't be too long before you can vanguish it.

Indeed. Factions is very very short. A mere 13 missions, and you skip some of them after picking a faction. It's also trivially easy to vanquish outside of the warden groups in the kurzick areas. Shiroken have no real damage outside of the elementalists. The buffed Ray of Judgement afflicted monks can be a problem I guess (I vanquished before eye of the north and that skill change, it used to suck, so the monks weren't even a minor threat), but if you grab pain inverter in eye of the north any target that does large amounts of damage just instantly explodes. It's easy to do 2,000 damage instantly with that skill, which can drop most bosses.

If you choose to go with the kurzicks, be warned that their mission requires a split if you wish to get the masters reward. I can hold off one side with 2-3 heroes and one of the 3 juggernauts with relative ease if you need assistance, leaving you with 4-5 people and 2 jugs. The luxon mission is equally obnoxious, if for different reasons. Lets put it this way. You can literally run 3 Minion Masters there because there are so many corpses. In other words, hordes. Big ones, and lots of them.

Ah. Well in that case, good luck with shiro. He isn't difficult, its just a somewhat random fight based on who he decides to banish. In Hard Mode having a monk banished is an epic pain in the ass. Shiro can be easily dealt with using spiteful spirit, spoil victor, empathy, price of failure, and a lot of blocking. Once he hits impossible odds, just clump up around him and watch several thousand damage nuke him in about 4-5 seconds.

Also, finally did Shards of Orr HM with my dervish with a speed clear group. D/A has much less damage than a regular A/D because you have to bring deadly paradox to maintain SF reliably. It also bites your energy, though in combat you are fine because zealous daggers generate lots of energy. No Bone Dragon Staff drop, but at least I have that dungeon out of the way.